At the restaurant, in more detail

The twentieth entry is sem frutos secos, glossed here as « nut-free », which is the one thing the words themselves do not appear to say. Read across, they say dry fruits, and an English reader who trusts that reading asks for a salad without raisins and then eats a walnut. The phrase is botanical rather than culinary: a nut is a dry fruit, and so os frutos secos are the almonds, the walnuts, the hazelnuts and the pine nuts — exactly the shelf English calls « nuts ». What a shop here sells as dried fruit, the raisins and dried figs and apricots, sits under the other gender in Portuguese: a fruta seca, or a fruta desidratada. One letter apart, and the two lists have nothing in common. English cuts the same shelf along a different line and keeps the halves in two unrelated words, « nuts » and « dried fruit », neither of which ever covers the other. Two entries above sits the cartão de alergias, and beside it that difference stops being a curiosity of vocabulary.